NAV Development Preview – July Update

The July update for Developer Preview is now live! With this update we can announce the following changes:

We’re addressing the most highly requested .NET replacement, namely XML handling. This update brings a set of new native AL types that let you create, read, update, and output XML documents using the XML DOM model. The most important new types include:

We announced the availability of tenant-specific profiles with our June update. We now offer new AL object types; Profile and Page Customization. These new objects let you define a set of pre-defined profiles and include them in your extension. The Page Customization object is very similar to a Page Extension object, but more restricted. As of now Page Customization can only include moving of controls and actions as well as setting Visiblity to true/false. It cannot contain variables, functions, or triggers.

Our VS Code extension now offers signature help for all syntax elements that have structured parameters, for example:

field(Name;Expression)
key(Name;Field1, Field2, Field3)

The RecordRef type has been reworked and made available for extension development. When used from extensions RecordRef.Open will only let you open records with ID less than 2 billion.

The Permission property has been reworked and made available for extension development. In the first iteration the property lets you only reference objects added within your own extension. However, this will be expanded in the future releases.

Let us know how you like working with these additions and keep submitting suggestions and bugs. You can see all the filed bugs on our GitHub issues list (https://github.com/Microsoft/AL/issues). To get an updated image you can see the steps for getting it in the original blog post or jump directly to the Azure Gallery signup at http://aka.ms/navdeveloperpreview.

For a list of our previous blog posts, see the links at the end of this post.

The W1 vs. US database is based on how the image was put together by Microsoft. For whatever reason this month they used a W1 database instead of US. Nothing you can do about that. Hopefully next month they’ll switch back to using a US one.

Due to internal build process changes, the July Update had to be released on the W1 version. The samples on GitHub have been updated but all other projects must be manually switched.
For more information, see this thread in GitHub:https://github.com/Microsoft/AL/issues/367